In my other guise as armchair quarterback for the YES Network Web site, I get a lot of mail from irate Yankees fans. One theme that emerges from time to time is, “Joe Torre would have sorted this team out!” Denial, as they say, is a river in Los Angeles — Torre has had no success in overcoming the Dodgers’ many injuries and ill-considered player moves, and there’s little reason to think that he would have had much more insight into the Yankees’ problems. In fact, in one specific area, that of the bullpen, it’s clear that Joe Girardi is a more effective manager than Torre.

Throughout the 2008 season, the Yankees’ starting rotation has been a bleeding wound, torn apart by injuries and surprisingly poor performances from top prospects. There is little any manager could do but keep plugging in more bodies until new options emerge or the old options get healthy. The bullpen, however, has been an increasing source of strength as the season has gone on — incredibly enough, even after Joba Chamberlain was plucked from its midst — largely because Girardi has been more open to giving new pitchers a chance than Torre ever was.

As a Yankee, Torre established two relievers in the majors — Mariano Rivera, with the help of the giant, neon-light hint of Rivera’s performance in the 1995 playoffs, and Scott Proctor, with perhaps an honorable mention given to Ramiro Mendoza. In 12 seasons, just 10 other pitchers relieved in more than 100 games for the Yankees, all of them veterans: Mike Stanton, Jeff Nelson, Flash Gordon, Kyle Farnsworth, Jason Grimsley, Mike Myers, Tanyon Sturtze, Graeme Lloyd, Paul Quantrill, and Ron Villone. Scattered below them on the Torre Roll of Obscurity are a multitude of half-hearted experiments, some of whom went on to success with other teams, and many of whom did not, and never even got the chance — baseball mints so many relief possibilities each season that there is minimal incentive for teams to give another team’s failed projects an even break until they’ve gone through their own — and most teams have more success in working out their relief possibilities than Torre did. Between his own impatience and the Yankees organization’s willingness to spend money on established relievers, he simply had no interest.

What Girardi seems to understand, or what the desperation of playing from behind in the standings all year has taught him, is that except in special cases like Rivera, the term “established reliever” is an oxymoron. Perhaps because of the outsize role that luck can play when a pitcher is working between 50 and 100 innings a year, even the best relievers in baseball experience a lot of year-to-year turbulence. In any given year, a ranking of the top 50 relievers in the game will show a 60% turnover from the year before. More importantly, in an average year, 20 of that season’s top 50 relievers won’t even have been in the majors the year before. Rivera, Joe Nathan, and a few other truly special pitchers stick on the list from year to year. Everyone else falls away.

This means that there is little value in trying to force things with, say, a LaTroy Hawkins, because the next Hawkins is always out there, waiting to be discovered. While Girardi has stubbornly stuck by his old teammate Farnsworth — in fairness he has gotten good work from him of late, though his home run rate remains dangerous — he has entrusted Edwar Ramirez and Jose Veras with more work than Torre ever would have, lately has given David Robertson a chance, and found occasional work for Jonathan Albaladejo before injuries ended his season. Girardi also tried, too stubbornly, to make Ross Ohlendorf the last word in mop-up men (or long relief — intentions seemed to vary depending on the needs of the day), but only succeeded in making long scores longer.

Not making bad situations worse, à la Ohlendorf, remains a project for the Yankees. When a reliever comes in with runners on, those runners often score. This is true of most teams, but the Yankees have been among the worst in baseball at stopping the bleeding. This year, the average major league team has stranded about 70% of inherited baserunners. Thanks to, in particular, Ohlendorf, Hawkins, and Billy Traber, the Yankees have stranded just more than 50%.

This, however, is a minor consideration at this point. What bodes well for the remainder of this season, and for future seasons as well, is that new relievers are being made, not signed to expensive free agent contracts or traded for at the cost of useful players. If Girardi ends the season with Ramirez, Veras, and Robertson as productive members of the bullpen, he’ll have created more relievers for the Yankees in one year than Torre did in more than a decade.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.